Deanna Larson

The bright, infectiously enthusiastic Sara Gruen couldn’t be further from the seedy circus subculture portrayed in Water for Elephants, her blockbuster novel that’s getting the Hollywood treatment in an eagerly anticipated new movie.

The story of Jacob Jankowski, an orphaned veterinary student who runs away with the circus and falls in love with sequined star Marlena, thrums with tension and violence, and odd unexpected moments of kindness and unsentimental love, too. The book’s scope and bittersweet atmosphere made it a natural for a feature film adaptation, and the project landed a top-notch cast, including stars Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattinson. The movie opens in theaters around the world on April 22.

Water for Elephants, which has sold more than 4 million copies to date, was a surprise hit by a little-known author when it was first published in 2006. As excitement for the movie builds, sales of the book are skyrocketing once again, with more than 800,000 copies shipped by publisher Algonquin within the last month.

“It was a very visual experience to write,” Gruen says of the novel. “Strangely, it felt like I was watching a movie. I get to a place where I don’t feel like I’m creating, but recording and capturing it. I’m smelling and hearing all of these things. I feel physically there.”

“If I’m going to spend eight hours a day in a fictional world, I would like to have an animal there as well.”

“My biggest fear as a writer is boring my readers,” Gruen says. “One of my philosophies as a novelist is to ratchet up the tension wherever possible.”

The story is packed with tension and contrasts, from the central love story of Jacob and the married Marlena and their deep connection with abused circus animals, to the camaraderie of a desperate band of strangers doing dirty and often undignified and difficult circus work.

“It was a very fraught time,” Gruen says of the early 20th-century traveling circuses. Both humans and animals were pushed to their limits to sell more tickets and line the pockets of the circus owners. The story features a pachyderm heroine named Rosie and other nameless and victimized animals that act as a kind of wordless Greek chorus to the events happening under the canvas.

Growing up in Canada, Gruen hadn’t even been to a circus before researching the book, but its details feel utterly authentic, especially the human-animal interactions.

“Animals play such an important role in my real world,” says Gruen, who is active in rescue efforts and lives with horses, dogs, cats and other creatures—along with her husband and children—in North Carolina. “If I’m going to spend eight hours a day in a fictional world, I would like to have an animal there as well.”

Despite the sometimes ugly history of circus animals, Gruen made sure that their filmic counterparts were treated well when she signed the movie contract. A stampede and other crucial scenes were produced with a green screen in the film, Gruen says, and she made sure that American Humane Society guidelines were followed on set. She insisted that no apes were used, since they suffer the most from being used in the entertainment industry, according to Gruen (whose most recent novel, Ape House, portrays a fictional ape laboratory).

Gruen and her entire family have cameos in the movie. Her big moment comes when Robert Pattinson (as Jacob) brushes past her during a tense scene with a runaway circus animal. “I’m the astonished woman watching an elephant [Rosie] steal produce!” she says.

Grateful for her “once in a lifetime experience” of spending a few days on a Hollywood set, Gruen was also “absolutely blown away” by the “fabulous” script for the film, by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Richard LaGravenese.

“He combined a few scenes and combined a few characters and it works,” Gruen says. “There are places where it veers away from the book, but then it comes back. I’m really excited to see it.”

The filmmakers invited Gruen to see the tents of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth set at the end of the production. “When we drove up over the berm, and there was the Benzini Brothers, I was speechless,” she says. “I still can’t really describe it—just knowing that it was all in my head five years ago . . . it was amazing.”

Gruen and her family are attending the film premiere April 17 in New York City. “Nobody’s going to be looking at the author, but I’ll be there,” she says. “My husband threatens to wear a 20-year-old suit, my oldest son wants to wear a gorilla suit, but me—I want to look glamorous.”

Gruen will have to gear up for the additional wave of popularity that the film will no doubt bring. “It’s still sinking in,” she says of her runaway bestseller, a favorite of book clubs across the country. “I am absolutely flabbergasted. I have no idea why it resonated the way it did.”

For a writer who estimated the chance of getting published at two percent but got a phenomenon instead, this traveling literary circus shows no sign of pulling up stakes and leaving the station any time soon.

Like many legendary sports writers before him, Mitch Albom embodies that plain-spoken but big-hearted guy you want to bear hug, then buy a beer. Not like Albom needs the favor: The sports journalist and radio host wrote Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir about his relationship with his dying college professor that spent four years on the New York Times bestseller list and became the best-selling memoir of all time an outcome that Albom never anticipated.

"The stories that I write, people seem to be able to grab onto as their own," says Albom, who often encounters people with their own Morrie stories at his signings. "It was my story, but they read it and applied it to their own life. I just wrote it to pay Morrie’s medical bills. It was more of an obligation than anything else. . . . The only way I knew I’d be able to help is if I wrote something."

Albom felt paralyzed when he realized that all people wanted for his follow-up was "Wednesdays with Morrie or Chicken Soup with Morrie. I kept saying I didn’t write the book to become a self-help author, and I didn’t write the book to become a guru, and I’m not gonna turn it into a franchise. That would be wrong, and I don’t think Morrie would be very proud of me." Always imagining he’d create things from scratch like novels, plays or movies, Albom decided that the time was right to tackle fiction. "I figured I needed to live long enough to observe things for real before I could start making them up," he says. But halfway through the process, Albom realized that setting a novel in heaven didn’t make for the easiest debut.

"It doesn’t follow the old ‘write what you know’ axiom, does it?" Albom laughs. That long-awaited work, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, became the most successful American hardback fiction debut ever, according to albom.com, selling more than 8 million copies worldwide. His new novel, For One More Day, is another book with supernatural overtones that hit the top of the bestseller lists within a week of its October publication. It has also sold more than 45,000 copies at Starbucks across the country and once again has hit a universal chord.

"That isn’t something I intend," he says. "I just write stories. I don’t think a whole lot about it. I just write them to move me. I figure if I can’t feel something . . . then nobody else will." The novel begins with washed-up baseball player Chuck Chick Benetto telling his life story to a sports reporter, starting from the moment he decided to kill himself. This attempt—like his former sports career, marriage, fatherhood and role as son—seemed a failure. But instead of a cowardly ending, Chick enters a dreamlike realm where he encounters his late mother and gets to share a final day with her, discovering family secrets, the reason his father abandoned the family, and finally saying all he wished he had said to her when she was alive.

Like many newspapermen-turned-novelists before him, Albom concentrates on character and storytelling and doesn’t torture himself over fancy technique or plots." I guess if you’re writing detective novels it’s all about plot or what will happen next," he says, "but you’re searching for something that gives you a shiver or brings a tear to your eye. You can’t force it." Albom’s favored themes of regret, forgiveness and redemption permeate his modern fables, along with the importance of caring as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up, and ring true with audiences young and old. But his book career almost stalled as publisher after publisher turned down the Tuesdays manuscript. One large publishing house even told Albom that he wasn’t capable of writing a memoir, "that I didn’t understand what a memoir was," Albom says."I never forget that nobody wanted that book."

The lessons learned writing for newspapers compact stories with emotional punch might make traditional publishers cringe, but those qualities have made Albom’s titles household names. " It’s hard to write short," Albom says. "People always think, they’re such small books, they can’t be significant. I think it’s a lot harder to write short than write long." Albom has already tackled blockbuster books, made-for-television movies (the Oprah-produced, Emmy award winner Tuesdays with Morrie and the screenplay for The Five People You Meet in Heaven) and plays (the off-Broadway adaptation of Tuesdays with Morrie). He’s even performed with the The Rock Bottom Remainders, a band featuring fellow writers Stephen King, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Amy Tan and Ridley Pearson. Can Hollywood be far behind?

"I’ve been approached to do a number of sports movies and even came close on a couple," Albom says. No doubt he’ll be patient and wait for the right pitch before knocking it out of the park. "I do know how it looks," Albom says of the sports milieu he’s spent much of his life describing. "And that’s the key for Hollywood movies: how it looks, how it feels and what they say. I do have a lot of that knowledge and it would be silly to throw it away. "